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From under my Hat
to recite it between the acts the next evening, as the Chicago and New York baseball clubs would be attending the performance.
That day Wolfie was very much upset. His son Jack was ill of diphtheria and not expected to live. He was in no mood for extras and tossed the paper aside.
But the next day he got a wire saying the boy was out of danger and going to pull through. He was so relieved that he sat down and learned Casey in an hour. He used to remark, "If Casey is anything, it is a mile long!" But he was always a very quick study.
"At the evening performance," he would remember, "the clubs were in the boxes; old Cap Anson, Buck Ewing, and all the rest. I pulled Casey on them between the acts, and what a hitl"
From that moment he began to be interested in Casey, and off and on for years he tried to find out whose initials, E.L.T., were signed to the poem.
One night several years later, playing, as he liked to say, "with unforgettable chic" in Wang in Worcester, Massachusetts, he received a note in his dressing room: Would Mr. Hopper care to come around to a certain club in town after the performance and meet the author of Casey at the Bat? Would he!
The author turned out to be a Worcester manufacturer, Ernest L. Thayer. He hadn't made himself known because he disliked publicity—an unheard-of thing today. Until the day in 1940 when he died in Santa Barbara, Mr. Thayer never did accept any royalties for performance of his famous lines. Casey was produced twice as a movie: in 1915, with De Wolf Hopper, and later with Wallace Beery. Both pictures were stinkers.
No one could ever say I married Wolfie for money. He didn't have any. When we were married he was supporting four womentwo ex-wives and two aunts— and I knew it. He was a man's man, yet he was hagridden all his life and could never afford to stop working.
His first wife, Ella, was his second cousin with whom he had had the mutual-protection pact. It was a foregone conclusion the union would end in divorce. It did.
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